Team - Vocabulary Voyager - Alice / Teale / Kira / Delaney

School: St Mary's Anglican Girls' School

Coach: Michelle Fitzpatrick

100 word app description:

Improve your spelling ability and expand your vocabulary with Vocabulary Voyager! You can practice as well as learn new words and their spellings in a fun, digital environment on your smart device. Designed for students from year two to six, Vocabulary Voyager offers a range of preset spelling lists based on the Australian curriculum and NAPLAN tests as well as enabling you to insert your own words. The app includes more challenging lists in order to expand your vocabulary. With enjoyable mini games and quirky pirates, build a foundation to aid in literacy at a secondary school level.

Here are screen shots from the prototype developed:

Here's the team pitch and demo video:

Here is the team business plan:

Executive Summary:

We chose to create Vocab Voyagers to generate an improvement in children’s literacy rates. This was our identified problem in our community, and we decided to create an app to encourage children to improve their spelling ability while playing a game.

Our app is going to be free as we believe everyone should have the opportunity to enhance their spelling ability without having to pay a premium. We will aim to launch it at the end of September 2015, just in time for WA’s school holidays.

Vocabulary Voyagers is aimed at children who struggle at junior school with spelling – which, if they don’t improve before senior school, they may face difficulties keeping up with other students.

What inspired us to make this app was that we are aware of literacy rates in our society. While they are good rates, there are always people who will feel left behind in terms of education. We wanted to help anyone who felt that they needed it.

Objective:

- To receive happy, positive responses from our customers, saying that they feel as though our app has genuinely helped them.- To increase children’s confidence by boosting their vocabulary and overall making them feel as if they can achieve more than they used to.- To make school life more enjoyable for children.- To help children in Years 3-5 achieve better results for NAPLAN.

About our app:

‘Vocab Voyagers’ will be established in Perth, Western Australia, and should be able to allow customers to experience enhanced spelling abilities.

It will be available on Google Play for Android devices from late September 2015.

- It comes with words to choose from- You have the ability to enter words in your own keyboard- It’s fun and engaging!

The Business Name:

As a group, we chose the name ‘Vocab Voyagers’ to give the impression of going on an adventure while learning at the same time.

We thought that the alliteration with the letter ‘V’ would be a good idea because it is memorable and it is also a reflection on what the app is based on.

We also used the word ‘Vocab’ instead of ‘Vocabulary’ because we thought it flowed better with ‘Voyagers’ and is easier to pronounce, especially if it is a young child saying it.

Promotion:

To promote our app as much as possible, we will aim to advertise it through:

- School (word of mouth)- Tech Girls Movement- Signs in primary school – with prior permission

Market Research:

We used market research to help us in gathering and evaluating information about our customers’ needs and preferences.

We created a survey of 10 questions which are all simply worded and are related to ability in spelling.

Our group then went to the primary section (Kindergarten to Year 6) at our school and briefly spoke to a class of Year 4s, giving each of them a survey. Once the surveys had been filled out, we collected them and logged the results on a computer.

Since then, we have used these results to make our app appeal to that audience, such as including fun games to enhance the playing experience.

Target Market:

As previously mentioned, we have assessed the spelling abilities of students in Year 4, and this age group would be our main audience.

Our ideal band of target audience would be Years 2 to 6, with each year group having ranging lists of words to comply with their spelling ability.

The geographic location of our target audience would be anywhere in Australia to begin with, and depending on the app’s expansion, further into the world.